THE WIZARD OF KOZ
by wtchcool
Summary: She thought she was going to be sick—she couldn't have run over her best friend… Wait. Lying not far from the corpse was a pair of red heels. There was something about those heels that seemed off. She felt like she should recognize…Oh hell. They were ruby slippers and they were lying, not on pavement, but on a yellow brick road. Crossover set during 'The Lich' part 2. Gen.
1. Chapter 1: To The Middle of Nowhere

"Not in Palm City Anymore"

By Wtchcool

_To all members of The Cape fandom, past, present, and future, this crossover is dedicated._

_Chapter One: To the Middle of Nowhere_

Jamie Fleming woke up with a concussion. Her head pounded as the blogger lifted it up from its position on the steering wheel of her Porsche.

"What happened?" the brunette twenty-something groaned.

"Arf! Arf!"

Jamie, a.k.a. Orwell, turned to the passenger seat and froze.

"This isn't real," she muttered. There, wagging his tail, was Frodo, the dog she'd had as a child—the dog that had died before Jamie had ever run away from home. She tried to figure out what was going on.

She remembered that the CEO of ARK Corporation (a.k.a. the psychopath that called himself Chess, a.k.a. her father, Peter Fleming) was about to purchase all of the land along Palm City's coastline. Her father having control of the city's ports would be a Very Bad Thing, but there was one way to stop it. The city couldn't sell the land to him if it rightfully belonged to someone else.

The last thing Jamie remembered, she was following a lead, talking with Conrad Chandler, the long-lost heir of the Chandler family… Everything after that was a blank. She didn't remember leaving the institution Conrad had grown up in, let alone getting in her car.

She forced open the car door, climbed out of the vehicle, and gaped.

She'd run someone over. Poking out from underneath the tires was a very familiar looking spider silk cape. She thought she was going to be sick—she couldn't have run over Vince! Faraday was her partner, her best friend in the world… _Wait a minute._ _That's not Vince_. What she could make out of the body didn't match Vince's figure. Not to mention the fact that lying not far from the corpse was a pair of red heels. Last time she checked, cross-dressing wasn't Vince's thing.

There was something about those heels that seemed off to her. She felt like she should recognize…_Oh hell._ They were ruby slippers and they were lying, not on pavement, but on a yellow brick road.

"Now I know this isn't real, Frodo," Orwell told the figment of her imagination. Frodo hopped down from the car and started nipping playfully at her heels.

"Ohhh, those will go great with my dress!" someone exclaimed cheerfully. The blogger looked up to see who it was.

"_Raia?_" What was the aerialist doing? And what was she wearing? The blonde (one of Vince's friends from the Carnival of Crime*) was decked out in an ankle length dress that, sure enough, matched the ruby slippers perfectly (and showed off her cleavage).

"That's me! The Good Witch of the North," Raia introduced herself, as she tried the slippers on. "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" she asked.

"I'm," _not even going to point out that if this follows the movie's screwed-up logic, you basically just asked me if I'm ugly. _"I'm not a witch. I'm no one special."

"Of course you're special! You killed the Wicked Witch of the East," she gestured to the body under the Porsche.

"By accident and I got a concussion for my trouble."

"Oh, let me see that." To Orwell's confusion, Raia attempted to 'kiss it better'—and it worked.

"Somebody must've drugged me," Jamie concluded. "Hey, if you're the Good Witch of the North, shouldn't you be telling me to take those slippers?"

"But they don't go with your outfit," Raia gave her a blank look. "And if you're not a witch, then unlike me, you're going to be doing a lot of walking. I think you'd be better off in sneakers."

"Let me guess—you're going to tell me I need to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City to meet the wizard?"

"You've heard of him! Do you need his help with something?" Raia asked.

"What I need is to wake up," Jamie was starting to get frustrated.

"Wake up?"

"I mean, return to Palm City, where I'm from. Hang on, why are we not surrounded by munchkins?" On second thought, if her car had dropped out of the sky, maybe it was a good thing that she'd landed in the middle of nowhere, where the only casualty was an evil witch.

Before Raia could reply, there was a bang and a flash of orange smoke. When the smoke cleared, it revealed Gregor Molotov.

"Kozmo," Jamie whispered. But the bastard was supposed to be behind bars on Owl Island. (This dream was getting old fast.)

Molotov, a.k.a. Kozmo, had left a string of dead bodies in his voyages through Europe, until he was captured and thrown into a Russian prison. The contortionist had escaped and headed to America—where he clashed with Vince, for a couple of reasons. Namely that Vince had elected himself the protector of Palm City and that the hero had something Kozmo wanted.

Oh, Gregor looked pissed. Maybe he remembered her?

"Who killed my sister Netta?" he growled. "Who killed the Witch of the East?"

Netta…wasn't that Conrad's nurse? Was she the one that had drugged her?

"That's my cue, right? Uh… 'I didn't mean to kill her, it was an accident!'"

"I can cause accidents, too," Gregor snarled, advancing on the young woman.

"Aren't you forgetting the silk cape?" Raia called out, distracting him.

"The cape! Of course, the cape!" The Russian contortionist turned away from the blogger and headed towards the Porsche. Just as he got to Netta's body, the cape vanished. His head snapped up.

"It's gone!"

"It's right there," Raia pointed to Jamie's shoulders. "There it is and there it'll stay," she grinned.

"Give me that cape," Kozmo demanded, once again rounding on Fleming. "It's no good to you; you don't know how to use it."

"It must be very powerful, for him to want it so badly," Raia observed.

"It doesn't belong to you," Orwell told him.

"Be gone, before somebody drops a horseless carriage on you!" the aerialist warned.

Gregor looked up at the sky, as if expecting it to start raining sports cars.

"Very well, but this isn't over. That cape is mine. I'll get you, you little daddy's girl. And your dog, too!"

* * *

Maybe, since she knew how the story was supposed to end, she could skip the journey to the Emerald City. Jamie closed her eyes, tapped her heels together three times, and repeated to herself: "There's no place like home."

She opened her eyes to find Raia, still in her ruby-red Good Witch of the North getup, scrutinizing her.

"Trying to cut your journey short?" the blonde asked.

"It didn't work…" She wasn't waking up that easily—probably too many drugs in her system, _damn it_.

"It might have helped if you meant what you were saying," Raia advised her.

"If I…Of course I meant it! I want to go back to Palm City!"

"But do you want to go **home**?" Raia pressed.

Home…she didn't really have a home to go back to. Since the time she had left home years ago, she had to hide from the investigators her father sent to find her. (And that was _before_ she had gotten daddy's attention using her skills as a hacker/blogger. Now her father had a second, considerably more sinister team trying to track her Orwell alias down.)

Vince's reckless interrogation of one ARK employee had gotten her flushed out of her hiding place, forcing her to share his hideout for the time being—not that she minded it, _but_…

Vince didn't know her. He couldn't. And someday, when he had cleared the name that her father had tarnished, he would go back to his family and she would be alone, again…

That said, she'd prefer going back to her clueless roommate to having to endure more of this stupid dream.

"Alright, if I have to go to the Emerald City, I can at least drive…Wait a minute," she took another look at the tires of her Porsche, noticing what was no longer under them. "Netta's body was right there."

"Kozmo took it with him," Raia explained. "I expect he'll want to bury his sister before he makes another demand for the cape."

"I guess that makes sense," Jamie said, frowning. "Come on Frodo," she scooped the dog up as she got into her car. The doors closed, she turned the key in the ignition, stepped on the gas pedal—and the car refused to budge.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me." No reason to get upset. She could just take a look under the hood and fix whatever was wrong; she was an expert in cars, after all. Then her eyes flicked to the fuel gage. The gas tank was empty. Stifling a groan, she turned back to her friend.

"I don't suppose there's a gas station around here?"

"What's a gas station?" Raia asked.

"Right, no cars in Oz. Thank you, L. Frank Baum, for writing about a fantasy world sans modern technology." That clinched it; this wasn't a dream, it was a nightmare.

"Alright, Frodo, back out of the car; looks like we're stuck walking," the blogger climbed back out. "See you in Emerald City," she added, before the witch bid her farewell.

* * *

"Oh, look, Frodo, a fork in the road, and no GPS in sight," Jamie grumbled what felt like hours later. "What kind of advice is 'follow the yellow brick road' if it goes in more than one direction?"

"You could try going that way," a man's voice called out to her.

Jamie's brown eyes grew wide. She turned around and instantly spotted the blond man strung up on a pole like a living scarecrow, one arm now pointing in one direction. She was pretty sure neither his usual vigilante costume nor his civilian clothes normally had straw poking out of the cuffs of his sleeves.

"Vince," she breathed.

***So named because, when not performing in the circus, the members supplemented their income with robberies.**

**Author's Note: If you're confused, let me know. I've revised the chapter in an attempt to allow people who are new to The Cape fandom a chance to read this without getting hopelessly lost. **

**Who's ready for chapter two? **


	2. Chapter 2: Caught In My Mind

_Chapter Two: Caught in My Mind_

"What the hell are you doing up there?" Jamie yelled as she ran up to Vince.

"The farmer stuck me up here. She said being a scarecrow was all I was good for, considering my birth defect. Plus, she was worried about keeping me out of trouble after I kept sneaking onto the Tin Man's property," he admitted sheepishly. "Could you let me down? It's kind of uncomfortable up here."

Jamie bit her lip, trying to remember how Dorothy got the Scarecrow down in the movie, before Vince finally told her which nail to twist. She yelped as her best friend hit the ground and rolled.

"You okay?" she asked, concerned.

"I've been better," he stood up and stretched. His muscles had to be sore from being stuck there for god knows how long.

"I know I'm going to regret asking, but what birth defect are you talking about?"

Scarecrow Vince blushed, muttering something under his breath about a cerebral cortex.

"What was that?" Jamie asked.

"I was born without a brain," he mumbled a bit louder.

"You mean metaphorically, right?" Jamie clarified. When her companion shook his head, her expression faltered. "Biology is a lot different here in this world," she added, once she'd regained the power of speech.

"I'm Vince," the scarecrow (needlessly) introduced himself.

"Orwell," was her automatic response. Jamie frowned, as she grasped his outstretched hand. What was she doing? There was no reason she couldn't be honest with Vince in a drug-induced hallucination. "That is, you can call me Jamie."

"Jamie, you're new in Oz, right? I've never seen you here before. Judging by what I overheard, you stopped somewhere awhile back to ask for directions, but you're still lost."

"Bingo," Jamie replied.

"Maybe I can help. Which way are you headed?"

"To the Emerald City; I'm going to ask the Wizard," whoever he turned out to be, "to send me home." She gazed at his face, half-wondering if she should remove the cape and give it over to him now. Vince was the one that knew how to use it.

"One of the witches gave you the cape," Vince observed before she could say anything.

"That's right, the Good Witch of the North gave it to me after I sort-of accidentally ran over the Witch of the East."

"If Raia gave you the cape, you should keep it," Vince assured her.

"To keep me safe from Gregor Molotov?" Orwell asked. "I have it on pretty good authority that he's going to seek his revenge for the whole me-killing-his-sister-thing. I imagine that would make me a pretty lousy traveling companion."

"Okay, yes, I was going to ask if you would mind if I go with you to see the Wizard. I wouldn't mind asking him for some brains.

"Gregor doesn't scare me. I'm not afraid of anything!" Vince bit his lip, before bending closer to her to make (another) confession. "Except for explosives," he whispered.

Explosives? Oh! The real Vince had almost been killed in an explosion! (As if she could forget the event that had put him in exile.)

"I don't blame you for that," she smiled. At least if she was going to be stuck in this dream, she had a friendly face to keep her company. Evidently Vince, whether real or imagined, would always keep her from feeling lonely. "To Oz?"

"To Oz."

~OZ~

Orwell's feet were killing her. She, Frodo, and Vince had been following that damn yellow-brick road for hours. She didn't know about her friend, but she was feeling exhausted and—her stomach grumbled—hungry.

How was it even possible to be exhausted when she was in a drug-induced sleep?!

"Vince, I don't suppose there are any rest stops along this route?" Where was a McDonald's—or better yet, a Starbucks—when you really needed one?

"You need a break," the scarecrow realized. He smacked himself on the forehead. "Of _course_ you need a break. People need to eat and sleep," he sounded agitated.

"And that upsets you because…?" the blogger asked.

"I'm frustrated because that's something basic that I should have thought of—that anyone with a brain would have known! This is _exactly_ why I was confined to that cornfield. If I had a brain maybe I could actually _do_ something with my life!"

"Just so we're clear, you're not about to break out into song, are you?" she asked. True, no one in her hallucination had been singing so far, but you never knew.

"Sing—I just told you I hate my life, why would I burst into song?" her friend asked, now sounding more puzzled than pissed off.

"No reason. Look, things will be better after we reach the Wizard. He'll…" she trailed off. If her dream was following the movie, then the wizard wouldn't give Vince a brain…

…Because he doesn't need one. He's smarter than he thinks he is.

"Earth to Jamie!" Faraday snapped his fingers in Orwell's face. "You spaced out there for a minute. You really must be tired. Come on, there's a place up ahead we can stop for a while."

"There is?" She didn't remember Dorothy and Scarecrow finding a shelter for the night. She remembered something about apples and trees with big egos and fewer brains than a scarecrow and …

"Wait, you said the farmer was mad because you kept going to visit the Tin Man?"

"'Visit,'" Vince scoffed. "Oh god, you make it sound like we were pals or something."

"I take it you're not. But then…"

"I went there to taunt Heartless," Vince said, as a small château came into view. "I still say it was perfectly safe, since he's in no position to go taking a swing at anyone, but Dana wouldn't _listen_.

"There he is," her friend nodded towards a figure standing as still as a statue in front of what was apparently his castle.

She realized that she recognized that costume, except she was used to seeing it in red leather. In the Land of Oz, the costume was made of metal from head to toe—boots, pants, jacket, gloves and mask all a dull silver, marred by rust. His hands and feet were bound with thick grey chords. Duct tape covered the man's mouth so that he couldn't speak—and from what she could make of his expression, he had quite a few things he wanted to say to Vince. Indeed, he began screaming in rage, his words garbled by the tape.

"Oh my god!" Orwell exclaimed. "Dad?!"

**Author's Note: Chapter title is from The Veils' song "Scarecrow." **

**I want to thank the guest who anonymously reviewed chapter one! This update is for you. **

**If anyone missed my recent Tumblr post, I promised the first person to review chapter nine of my other ongoing crossover, "Black Bird; Green Arrow," beta-ing services from yours truly. If you have questions, PM me or hit me up on Tumblr.**


End file.
